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mikejuk writes "Microsoft has announced that the Expression suite of design tools is no more. It has been removed from sale immediately and it has been placed on a maintenance only status until it reaches its end of life. Expression was Microsoft's offering for designers and competed directly with Adobe products. You can now download the components of Expression — Design 4, Web 4 and Encoder 4 — for free but you can't buy them. Of course, knowing that you are using 'doomed' products, even for free, takes some of the icing off the cake. The central component of the suite the UI designer Blend is to be integrated with Visual Studio 2012 probably along with Update 2. It looks as if Microsoft is giving up on trying to get designers to use its tools."

/. makes this sound like a bad news but the devs who used expression (including the team I work on) view this as really positive move. While Expression Blend/Web/etc. was not a bad product everyone was frustrated that they needed to switch between Expression Whatever and Visual Studio. Everyone just wished features were part of VS as they are supposed to be now. This is not abandoning the tools this is improving the tools. Also this would never meant to compete with Adobe. Expression were tools to create UI for MS dev tools (XAML and Web) and did not include anything like Photoshop. Saying that Expression aimed to compete with Adobe is plain wrong.